'The ultimate surrealist act would be to go out on the street and starting shooting at people for no reason".---Andre Breton
Well, Andre, the ultimate postmodernist act would be to wage a war and sell it as a TV show, pay-per-view. (Hint: It's already been done.) Ordinarily, I do not review books by friends, on the grounds that it would like recommending your mistress to other men, or women. I am making an exception for Perry Anderson, first because he is the only person I have ever known in my life whom I would without qualifications call a genius, and second the relevance this blazing volume has to understanding postmodern literature and other arts, from Pynchon and Barth to identity politics novels and films. Perry, practicing historian and editor of NEW LEFT REVIEW, set out to examine just how the image came to be disassociated from anything real, and how the author, the text and even Man himself all died. Although traces of postmodernism can be found in literature and art of the Thirties and Forties, think of Dali's paintings or Malcolm Lowry's novel UNDER THE VOLCANO, both of which are self-referential, postmodernism must be understood in the light of vast changes in capital following World War II, relations between labor and capital, and the "end of ideology" in the West. The dollar replacing the pound as the global currency; the dollar delinked from gold to guarantee its worth, and the shift of advanced capitalist economies from producing goods to services and from services to non-tangibles, above all entertainment and tourism, all signaled an axial shift away from objects, among them food, water, and minerals, to relations and transactions as the main profit-maker for capital. (Lucky for Perry he published this book before the rise of NFTs.) So too did the decline of labor unions and the split between political left and right that had marked the pre-war years. Quick, name a significant difference between Democrat-Republican (USA), Conservative-Labourite (UK) and Christian Democrat-Social Democrat (Germany). Ironically but also inevitably, this convergence among capitalists, combined with their domination over a neutered trade union movement, produced art in which the individual was fragmented (Pollock, Beckett), helpless before the titanic forces before her and him (Pynchon, Godard), or just plain insane (Grass's drummer-boy, Oscar, who never grows up in THE TIN DRUM). Since in a post-modernist society literacy is not a requirement to the good life, defined by passivity, film overtook the novel as the representative, and most profitable, genre of this age. Does this mean all ways of fighting back are doomed? The anti-monopoly (not anti-capitalist) camp is either composed of historical reenactment societies, such as the left parties of Europe or New Deal Democrats in the U.S., or else race and gender political groupings who want integration into the system, on their terms. Perhaps, to quote the premier postmodernist thinker today, Frederic Jameson, we are fated to live our lives championing "libertarian pessimism". Like Spartacus, we will lose, but unlike that rebel genius we can throw a party before being crucified.